Fault tolerant controller design for component faults of a small scale unmanned aerial vehicle

In this paper additive fault detection and isolation method coupled with fault tolerant control architecture are developed in order to deal with component faults for a rotorcraft based unmanned aerial vehicle (RUAV). The failure considered is malfunction with internal components of the helicopter which occurs during the maneuvers: rotor angular rate variations, etc. These faults lead from trivial to catastrophic damage of the system. The proposed fault detection and reconfiguration control is based on a parameter estimation approach which drives a reconfigurable control system (RCS) build with the Pseudo-inverse method. The complete setup is implemented under Hardware-in-the-loop-simulation (HILS). The PC104 board with QNX RTOS platform is used for simulation. Simulation results illustrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.